A terrible fantasy novel I didn’t care about. The $2 I would have gotten from it at Half Price was not worth hauling it around for three weeks once I realized on day two that I wasn’t going to read more than 50 pages.

Five worn-out pairs of underwear and two worn-out bras. This was by design. Going to get thrown out somewhere. Good-bye, skivvies! Good-bye!

The Finnish phrasebook that contained “Can I get this in gabardine?” but not “service required” or “oil change” or…really, gabardine? Gabardine? Also, the dating section: if all I can say is, “can I get this in gabardine?”, I feel that “dating” is perhaps a euphemism, and going ahead and labeling it the “picking up strangers for sex” section is better. There were not any phrases in this section like, “What do you do?” or “What are your hobbies?” with a list of common answers. Kids, we have words for this, and they are not “dating.”

My black ankle boots, with two new rips in the leather. Well done, boots! Your service was appreciated!

Three pairs of tights. Unlike the boots and skivvies, these were not planned. They were eaten by the boots in their ravenous last days.

The Finnish guidebook that blandly mentioned that Helsinki might have modern art museums but not what or where, and claimed that there was a market where there was no market. I found the market. Helsinki was great. The guidebook not so much.

My purse. Um. This one was even less planned than the tights. It became leprous and started losing chunks of leather. Purse! Don’t do that, purse! I had to buy a purse in a Stockholm boutique on an emergency basis.

My fear that vertigo means no overseas travel. Vertigo means carefully managed international travel. Timed around the meds, planned very precisely around certain parameters. Do I know a year in advance whether a particular trip will be possible? No. But will some kinds of trips be possible? I think so. Yes.

Any sense that I might go the rest of my life without returning to the Arctic. Oh. Oh, you guys. The light, the air. The rivers. The rivers. I was barely out of Rovaniemi before I started researching Tromsø, Kiruna, Hammerfest, more. More. More. I’m going back. It can’t be soon, but–I have to go back.

There may also be a single perfectly good purple sock missing. Laundry progresses and hope recedes.

Yah, it takes a bit for someone from the banks of the Mississippi to say that a river counts for something. The Kemijoki and the Ounasjoki deliver. And a great many of the far northern Swedish rivers are nothing to sneeze at either.

I didn't really have an emotional understanding of why so many of the Saami tribe names translate to x river Saami, until I was there. And then it was obvious, it was like why the people here are the x lake band of different Native groups. Because. Well.

I should get the name of the guidebook and the phrasebook from you so that I don't pick them up for the trip that I hope to take to Finland next year. (Actually, when that gets closer to the planning phase, I will probably have questions for you on things to see/do in Helsinki.)

I am so so happy for you that you can manage international travel even with the vertigo.